


hang my sorrows on the line

by geryon



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, post ending fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-30 02:53:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18306740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geryon/pseuds/geryon
Summary: You come back to New York in the summer.





	hang my sorrows on the line

**Author's Note:**

> oof i wrote it all in one go after reading the manga for the first (!!) time. Apologies for inconsistencies.

You come back to New York in the summer. 

 

It’s spring when you left, the first time. Distinctly, you remember leaves pushing their way out from branches, glimpsed through the tiny window in your hospital room. They rattle against the glass when there’s a high wind, like someone knocking against the door. Time after time you awaken from sleep like someone falling from a great height to that tapping, your heart jerking out of your chest and you forcing your eyes open in some desperate hope. But the door never opens. Or rather it does, but it’s never the person you want to see. 

 

So you left. That’s simplifying things- leaving. It doesn’t sum up all the shattered bits of you, inside and outside, bound together with string and taped up. If you were a box it would be labelled  _ fragile,  _ something carrying glass easily broken. When Sing comes to visit you give him the letter, written in all the hours of hoping, written in the only way you know how: you want to be honest. You think,  _ there’s only one way to convince him,  _ this boy who’s always been lied to, you think,  _ I know you, _ you think,  _ come back to me if you can.  _ You think,  _ And even if you can’t. Come back, anyway.  _

 

On the envelope you write simply,  _ Dear Ash,  _ so even if Ash hardened his heart and throws it away unopened he would know, that- at least that- but you’re sure he must know already. Doesn’t he? It’s better to be certain, anyway. You watch Sing take it from you with both hands, carefully, reverent. Sing’s still so young. That disheveled hair growing too long in the front, his cheeks still hinting at baby fat, the way his oversized hoodie swamps his shoulders. He smiles at you; he’s deadly serious, for you. 

 

So you trusted him. And you trust the gods too, both Japanese gods and western ones, because they’ve held you safe for so long, and there’s no reason to suspect that after all the danger has passed there will be anymore waiting- but there was, wasn’t there? There’s probably an idiom for this, the danger that strikes after you’ve let down your guard, clenched in the fist of hope all the way back to your hometown, dreaming of Ash in every familiar place you missed. It comes with a phone call in the night and you don’t believe it. 

 

How could you? He’s defied death before. 

 

So you disbelieve. That’s love, you supposed, in hindsight. Love is disbelieving all the evidence stacked against you, love is- blindness, in a way.  

 

For almost a year you stopped believing in anything except Ash. You conjure wild conspiracies, eating mechanically food placed in front of you by your parents, you phone Sing and Max at all hours, disregarding the time zones difference. They’re soft, at first, broken themselves from the news. You’re not the only one who loved him, much as you would like to guard his memory, jealously, for yourself. You know that, anyway. As much as Ash wanted to believe he could only love one person in this whole shattered, broken up world, it wasn’t true. He loved them all, too much. 

So you didn’t believe the news of his death and now here you are, in JFK airport, everything so similar to the first time you arrived you want to hurl all over the polished marble floor. Suddenly it was the worst idea, coming back. Suddenly you realise it was true, that Ash is dead, that you’re having this realisation thousands of miles from your family all alone in a foreign land, that you’ve come back to nothing, and no one. 

 

“Eiji!” 

 

Sing’s grown a lot in the time you’ve been away. He wraps both arms around you and he smells like cigarette smoke, warm and broad shouldered and far too tall now. He’s stick thin, somehow, like all his energy has been used to grow taller like a young tree and he couldn’t spare any to grow horizontally. You hug him back, mechanically. He’s like an anchor, in the swirl of things pushing onto you. 

 

“Is this all you brought?” he says, picking up your suitcase. 

 

“Yes,” you say. Your English sounds all rusted, and you duck your head in embarrassment. Sing smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. You still know him, it seems. 

  
  


He doesn’t talk on the long way back from the airport. You fall asleep, too exhausted by the journey and passing blur of grey street scenes. It’s summer, but nowhere near green enough in the concrete sprawl of New York. 

 

You wake up to Sing shaking your shoulder, gently. “We’re here,” he says. 

 

He has a house on Long Island. It’s in a deceptively quiet neighborhood, suburban and leafy with an overgrown garden and a kitchen island. You don’t ask why it’s so far from the City, but it made sense he would want a break from the bustle of downtown. Somehow everything you thought before you came back was swirling in your head. You had no idea what to do now that you’re really back. 

  
  


The first night you walk into the kitchen and he’s drinking whiskey, face grey. It shocks you, even though it shouldn’t, this teenager who didn’t look quite so young anymore, drinking whiskey neat out of a chipped mug. He stares at you, like he wants to ask for something, and it’s taking all his will to stop himself from doing so. 

 

Good, you think, savagely. You have nothing to give him. You have, nothing. So you leave him in the kitchen, all alone with his guilt and his sorrow and his quiet. Later you realize why you hated him and loved him and left him, in that moment. 

 

He reminded you of Ash. And he wasn’t Ash. It was so simple it took all your breath away and left you curled in the bedsheets in the hot damp darkness, unable to breathe through your tears. 

 

You wake far too early the next morning. It’s not quite dawn, everything blue and silent. All at once the birds start, out in the yard. You pull the curtains open all the way to watch the sunrise, the breeze lifting heat off your cheeks like a lover’s hand. 

 

Sing walks into the kitchen when you’re almost done making breakfast. He’s hungover, and quietly eats the omelette you make from the three eggs you found in the fridge. 

 

“You need to get groceries,” you say, sniffing the milk carton and pouring the rest into a glass. He sips it, sheepish. 

 

“Sorry,” he says. “Do you want to share this?”

 

“I ate all the bread you had left.” 

 

You watch him wolf down his food, exactly like any hungover boy in the world. When he scrapes the plate clean he says, “Do you want to see- do you want to visit him?” 

 

Sing’s never been someone to beat around the bush. It makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time. You nod. 

 

The two of you take the train into the city, watching small suburban towns turn into industrial complexes and then the hectic sprawl of the city proper. It must have been expensive to bury Ash in Manhattan; you don’t ask how Sing managed it. The cemetery is lush with greenery but hemmed by tall brick buildings. It’s almost, you think, perfect. 

 

The gravestone is simple. You trace his name in the marble with the tip of your finger. Sing’s gone away, you realise. It’s alright; he’s clearly been here enough before. The grave site is neat and clean of weeds. There’s a cellophane wrapped bunch of flowers wilting against the stone. It’s just you, now. Because Ash wasn’t here, you know, dimly, your forehead pressed to the marble words. He wasn’t anywhere. There’s only space. And now you understand that he is dead you understand that you, too, had died. Some part of you, and you hadn’t even known it till now. 

 

When you walk back out Sing’s smoking a cigarette, back turned to the wind. There’s dark circles under his eyes and a tremor in his hand. You think about the letter. You think about the seasons, turning, and the planet below you and the sky above you. 

 

“Sing,” you say, voice still rasping from all the tears you’ve tried not to cry. You can’t get the rest of the words out. You forgive him; you do. But you can’t say it, so you wrap your arms around him instead, and the city carries on bustling all around the two of you, folded into each other and all alone. 

  
  
  
  


You stay in New York. It’s inevitable, it seems. You stay because you couldn’t forgive yourself for leaving, the first time. You stay because you love it, a little like how you love Ash, curiosity giving away to understanding giving away to that bottomless unnamed thing that winds itself around your soul and engraves itself into your bones. You’re stuck and you’re moving on, all at the same time. You buy the apartment in Greenwich, you invite all the boys and Max and Jessica and Nadia and Charlie over, squeezed into the few rooms and too chaotic to be called a housewarming. You smile, you cry, you never stop waking half an hour before dawn to watch the sunrise, fingers pressed against the glass. 

 

Some day, you think, the cracks in you will be papered over, no matter how.  _ Stronger in the places that we’ve been broken. _ Maybe that’s true; maybe not. You know that Ash would have believed that, and it gives you something like solace. And sometimes, in the half hour where you’re waiting for the sun to rise, perched on the window ledge with your arms wrapped around your knees, you slip into something like a waking dream. It used to happen a lot, back when you were with Ash; exhausted to the point of hallucination, sitting back to back in some dirty shell of a building, waiting for the next assault to come out of the dark. You’d imagine the future: the two of you in bed with a stack of books on his side and a stack of food to feed him with on yours, the window open and the stars shining down. Your brain’s a curious thing, the way it makes up stories to make things bearable. 

 

You’re sitting on the edge of the window, and you feel it. His hand, on your shoulder, his grip firm and warm. The brush of his too long hair against your cheek, and his voice. 

 

He says,  _ Eiji,  _ and when you kiss him you can feel him smile.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> "Stronger in the places that we’ve been broken" AND Eiji's imaginary future is from Hemingway.
> 
>  
> 
> thanks for reading! <3


End file.
